Photograph, page 20
Beyond the gate, I could see the three-story house, which was a shell now, its windows shattered by storms and vandals, its moss-covered roof looking vulnerable to the next heavy snow. From the satchel purse hung on my shoulder, I removed a page I’d copied at the library. It was the front page of The Herald-Palladium, its banner headline announcing the murders. Article by Terry Blaine. Photo by Terry Blaine. I remembered Terry telling me that he’d been first on the scene, ahead of all but a couple of police cars. He’d taken a picture of the exterior of the Daugherty mansion, which was in its glory days then, the landscaping impeccably manicured, the interior lights glowing brightly inside the estate. The comparison from then to now was like the fall of the House of Usher, a slow descent into ruin.
“Nobody wanted to live here after the murders,” said a voice behind me.
I turned around and saw Chuck Kimble getting out of his Pontiac. He wore sunglasses, and his Jason Statham stubble was darker than usual. The typically tight knot of his tie was loose, with his collar button undone. He came up and stood beside me at the gate, frowning as he took in the sight of the house. He had a thick folder under his arm, which I assumed was the police file I’d asked him to bring.
“Greg Daugherty had an older brother in California who inherited the place after the murders,” Kimble explained. “He had no interest in living here himself. He couldn’t find anybody who wanted to rent it. For a while, he hired someone to keep it up, but eventually the house became too expensive to maintain. So he let it go. Pipes burst. Animals got inside. It became unlivable. When the brother got sick of letters from the county, he turned it over to them for back taxes. Every year they talk about tearing it down, but they never put money in the budget to actually do it. My sister says they’re afraid to disturb the ghosts.”
I had no trouble believing that. The place had a haunted quality.
“Can you get us inside?” I asked.
“Through the gate, yeah, but the house itself is condemned. It’s not safe. Besides, you wouldn’t find anything in the interior. It’s empty. All the possessions got taken out years ago.”
He dug in his pocket for keys. The one part of the gate that wasn’t rusted was a lock and chain that tied the two wrought iron panels together. He undid the padlock, slid away the chain with a rattle, and pushed hard to open one side of the gate far enough that we could squeeze inside.
“By the way, I need to tell you something,” I said.
“Oh?”
I explained about the shooter behind the motel overnight. Kimble didn’t look happy with me.
“Why didn’t you call 911? Or text my phone?”
“Sorry. I should have. But it was late, and he was long gone. I didn’t think I needed to get you out of bed so you could tell me there wasn’t much chance of catching this guy.”
“Next time, call,” Kimble snapped. He added, “For now, I’m also going to overlook the fact that you don’t have a Michigan license for the Glock you’re carrying. But if you fire it again, you and I are going to have problems. My advice is you lock it in your suitcase and leave it there.”
“Understood.”
But I wasn’t going to do that.
We walked side by side toward the ruined house, which was somehow more impressive in its decay than it was as a pristine estate in the newspaper photograph. I knew there was nothing left inside, and yet I wished I could go in and see the crime scene for myself. Places keep memories and echoes long after the people are gone. I thought if I saw it, if I could feel it, I could absorb how it had all happened. The ghosts of Greg, Lauren, and Zeke Daugherty would replay their fates for me.
“What was it like that night?” I asked.
I wanted to hear about it from someone who had been there.
Kimble stopped on the driveway. He put the murder book at his feet and shoved his hands in his pockets. His face could have been a Rodin sculpture made of bronze. “Chaos.”
“I bet.”
“It takes a lot to scare cops, believe me, but everybody was scared. You could see it in the eyes.”
“Even you?”
He shrugged. “Even me. I was supposed to be off duty that evening. My sister and I lived in a little two-bedroom apartment half an hour north of town. I was a rookie, new to the area; it was all I could afford. Bug and I were playing Go Fish when the call came in. All hands on deck, everybody report. It wasn’t late, just after ten. It had only gotten dark a few minutes earlier. So I got in my cruiser and went screaming south. The scene was wild. Dozens of cops. Ambulances. Neighbors outside the gate shouting questions at us. Phil was running around yelling at people. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like Phil, but he was over his head. Hell, we all were. We weren’t equipped to handle a crime scene like this, but nobody wanted to be the one to say we should bring in pros from Grand Rapids, Lansing, or Detroit. This was our murder. Our people. We were going to deal with it ourselves.”
“And the scene?”
Kimble didn’t answer right away. He picked up the folder, and we kept walking together. At the end of the driveway, we reached the front door, which wasn’t a front door at all anymore. The entrance had been boarded over with plywood nailed to the frame of the house. Vandals had made their mark. Red spray paint across the wood said: The dead walk here. It gave me a little shiver. I looked at the rest of the ground floor and saw that the windows had been boarded up to keep out intruders. But anyone who wanted to get into the house could have done so.
“The first body was Greg’s,” Kimble said, pointing. “He was found right there, right on the other side of the door. Phil figured that Greg opened the door, and the killer unloaded with two shotgun blasts immediately. One to the chest, one to the face. He dropped him where he stood, then walked over the body into the house. There were footprints in the blood.”
“Why not leave? Greg was already dead.”
“This wasn’t just about him.”
I frowned, then said, “The family. They were targets, too.”
“Yeah, the gang wanted to send a message. People don’t necessarily care what happens to them, but they care about their spouses and kids. If you want to keep them from talking, you make sure they know the killers won’t just come after them. Betraying the gang means signing a death warrant for everyone you love.”
I shook my head in disgust. “Lauren was next? His wife?”
“Yup. She would have heard the shots. She was a DA’s wife, so she knew what it meant. We found her hiding in the kitchen. They had a walk-in pantry, and she was on the floor at the back, nowhere to go. The killer had already reloaded. Same MO on Lauren. One in the chest, one in the face. I remember some of the bone from her skull nicked a bag of flour right above her. It was so grotesque, no face left, all the blood everywhere, and flour covering her like pancake makeup.”
I felt sick but didn’t want to show it. Kimble’s voice was a monotone. No emotion at all, just detachment.
“And Zeke?”
“Zeke tried to be a hero. He probably could have gotten away. His bedroom was upstairs in the attic, but the house is built against the slope. It’s not a long jump from the window to the ground.”
He pointed to the side of the mansion, and I could see that he was right. A hill rose immediately next to the house, and where the windows on the attic gable opened outward, it was only eight or ten feet to a stretch of lawn that ended in dense trees. Zeke could have made the leap; he could have reached the wall surrounding the estate and climbed it and been free.
He could have saved himself, but he didn’t.
“What did Zeke do?” I asked.
“He came downstairs. The shooter met him on the second floor in the hallway. Zeke had a baseball bat in his hands. He must have charged the guy, because the killer’s aim was slightly off. The first blast hit Zeke in the thigh. That was enough to take him down. He was probably squirming, trying to crawl away. Round two went into his neck. Nearly severed his head.”
“God.”
Kimble kept the murder book tightly under one arm. He licked dry, cracked lips and shook his head. “So why did you want to come here, Shannon?”
“I needed it to be real for me.”
“Well, it is.”
“Did you know the family?”
“Sure, I knew Greg,” Kimble told me. “He made a point of working with the rookie cops. We were the front line, you know, more than detectives like Phil. If we screwed up the evidence at an initial scene, that made it harder for Greg in court. So he spent a lot of time making sure we knew about proper procedure. But he had an amazing memory for people, too. He knew where you were from, who your parents were, what your wife’s name was. Phil said Greg sent birthday cards to his three little girls every year. Every time I saw him, he asked how my sister was doing. I don’t know how he kept it all straight in his head, but he did.”
“Sounds like a good guy.”
“Yeah, he was. But you know, you take on the tiger, and sometimes the tiger eats you. Law of the jungle.”
“What happened to the Chicago gang?”
“Nothing. At least not as far as the law went. Nobody from here was going to mess with their business after they took out the Daughertys. But they didn’t stay on top for long. That’s how it goes. A couple years later, a different tiger came along and ate them.”
“Circle of life?”
“Something like that.”
I wandered into the long grass, which came up nearly to my waist. The Daugherty house, or what was left of it, loomed over me. I tried to feel the ghosts; I tried to hear the screams. I stared at the broken windows, especially the attic windows above the hillside.
Zeke’s bedroom.
“Do you have pictures?” I asked Kimble.
“Pictures?”
I nodded at the folder under his arm. “Crime scene photos.”
“That’s why you wanted me to bring the murder book?”
“Yeah, I have a theory.”
Kimble snorted. “What is it?”
“Dawn was dating Zeke.”
“The two of them, a couple? Based on what? Nobody mentioned that.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s true. Gordon said Dawn told him about it. She started out tutoring Zeke in math, then it got romantic. Sounds like it was pretty serious as far as teenagers go. Two kids in love. Zeke bought her diamond earrings. Big investment for a high school kid, but his parents had money.”
“If Gordon knew, why hide it?”
“Why do you think? His sister had just been murdered by the drug gang. He was scared. And I don’t think anybody else in town had a clue. Dawn and Zeke were keeping it under wraps. His father probably told them to keep it quiet—safer for both kids, given Greg’s job. But they were involved. That’s what I’ve been missing. That’s what ties the two murder scenes together.”
“Well, assume you’re right. What do you think happened that put Dawn in the crosshairs? Did Zeke tell Dawn something about his father’s investigation? Something that made her a target?”
“No, I think it was much simpler than that.”
“Like what?”
“Let me see the pictures.”
Kimble frowned. He didn’t rush to open the folder. I could see him studying me from behind his sunglasses, evaluating what I knew and didn’t know. Cops don’t trust private investigators. They don’t like letting strangers play in their playground. But he knew that I’d brought heat to an investigation that had been stone cold for more than twenty-five years.
Finally, he undid the string that held the folder shut. Inside, he pulled out a thick stack of eight-by-ten color photographs. He handed them to me, and I went through them one by one. It wasn’t easy. The pictures of the bodies were enough to churn the stomach of an urban cop, and I wasn’t one of those. At some of the photos, I had to close my eyes and look away. The massacre had resulted in so much blood that it was hard to know whose body I was looking at, other than by the surroundings. The white tile floor of the foyer was where Greg had died. The grotesque cloud of flour in the pantry covered his wife. And then there was Zeke, face down in a carpeted hallway upstairs. Three human beings, a family wiped out in a matter of seconds. I wondered if the killer had been in the house longer than a minute or two.
Eventually, I got to the pictures I wanted to see—the ones I’d hoped would be there. A good crime scene photographer will cover the entire house, not just the areas where the bodies were found. You never know when you’ll need a record of something you can’t anticipate at the beginning of an investigation. So I was relieved to see that they had taken multiple photographs inside Zeke’s attic bedroom. I spent several minutes studying the details of the room, looking for the things that would confirm what I already knew.
Kimble cleared his throat impatiently. “Well?”
“Look at the bedroom window,” I told him.
He studied the picture in my hands. “What about it?”
“It’s closed.”
“So?”
I retrieved the newspaper photograph that Terry Blaine had taken in the early minutes after the police arrived at the scene. “Here the window is open. See? The lights are on inside. You can see the casement frame tilted outward.”
“One of the officers probably closed it to protect the scene.”
“Okay. But it was open at the time of the murders.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning someone could have escaped that way, just like you said. Someone could have jumped out the window.”
“Nobody else was in the house,” Kimble said.
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think Zeke was alone in his bedroom. That’s why he chose to be a hero. That’s why he ran downstairs to take on the shooter instead of saving himself by going out the window. He was giving his girlfriend time to get away. Dawn was there.”
TWENTY-FIVE
“Do you have any actual proof of that?” Kimble asked me. “Because I don’t see any evidence in the photos that Dawn was in that bedroom. Hell, I’m not even convinced that Dawn and Zeke were really dating.”
I felt the weight of the satchel purse I was carrying over my shoulder.
Yes, I had proof.
“Look at Zeke’s bed,” I said. “And the floor of the bedroom. He’s got worksheets spread out everywhere. He was doing math that evening before he was killed. Dawn was helping him get a head start on his trigonometry class with Rick Kaslan. The fall semester at school was going to be starting in a couple of weeks, and Zeke was serious about doing better.”
Kimble frowned. “Okay, Zeke was studying math. That doesn’t prove Dawn was with him.”
“Dawn was a whiz at trigonometry, and Zeke barely passed his freshman geometry class. You think he was doing complex trig identities on his own? With no help? I don’t think so.”
“That’s a guess. That’s not proof.”
“The proof isn’t what’s in the bedroom,” I told him. “It’s what’s not there. You know, like the dog not barking in the night.”
“What are you talking about?”
I held up one of the crime scene photos. “See that CD on top of the stereo? You can make it out clearly. It’s Wide Open Spaces by the Dixie Chicks.”
“Yeah, so?”
“There’s no jewel case for the CD. There’s a stack of discs on the stereo, but no case for the Dixie Chicks. You know why?”
Kimble didn’t look like a man who enjoyed games. “Why?”
“Because I have it.”
“What?”
I dug into my satchel purse and pulled out an empty jewel case for Wide Open Spaces. “I found this in the box Dawn’s mother gave me. Dawn still had the jewel case in her bedroom, but the CD itself was missing. Now I know why. She left it behind in Zeke’s room when she escaped that night. She was in a wild panic, stuffing things in her backpack before she went out the window.”
Kimble was slow to respond. “Or she left it there some other time. Do you have anything else?”
“There’s no book.”
“I see lots of books.”
“Yeah, but there’s no trig book. How was Zeke doing trig identities without a book? He wasn’t in Kaslan’s class yet, so he didn’t even have a book. But Dawn did. She brought it with her.”
I reached into the purse on my shoulder again and took out the weathered, yellowed copy of Introduction to Trigonometry that I’d found in the same box from Dawn’s bedroom. I flipped through the pages so that Chuck Kimble could see what was inside.
“Look at the notes on the pages. I noticed it when I first saw the book, but I didn’t really pay attention to it. Today, when I realized Dawn and Zeke were dating, I went back and checked more closely. There are two sets of handwriting in the book. Dawn’s is very precise and flowery. The other set is messier, more scribbled. It’s definitely male. Do you see the worksheets on the floor? Even in the photographs, you can tell they match. That’s Zeke’s handwriting. He and Dawn were using her book to study that night.”
Kimble’s bronze-hard face got even stiffer.
I knew he was thinking about ways to poke holes in my theory. That’s what cops do. And yeah, it was true, I couldn’t really prove that Dawn was there. But she was. Knowing that, everything else made sense. That’s why she was scared to death. That’s why she knew someone would be coming after her.
She was the only witness, the only survivor, at a deadly slaughter.
I stared at the pictures of Zeke’s bedroom again, like an awful moment frozen in time. In my head, I listened to their ghosts. It was so easy to imagine the banter of two teenagers in love, Zeke stealing kisses, Dawn giggling and telling him to concentrate on his studies. She probably sang along to the Dixie Chicks songs on the stereo. At that age, the night must have felt perfect. Happiness is so pure when you’re young, not tainted by the losses of getting older.
Then came the first two shotgun blasts.
Zeke didn’t know it yet, but his father was already dead in the foyer. What happened next? His mother knew Zeke and Dawn were upstairs in the attic bedroom. Did she scream and warn them before hiding in the pantry? She was probably trying to draw the killer away from the kids.
